The Apron
Posted by Martha & Greg Singleton , Wednesday, November 12, 2008 11:05 AM
It’s a faded brown gingham apron, hand-stitched, trimmed with a ribbon and a row of equally faded pinkish ric-rac. They say she never was without her apron, and sure enough, the photo I have shows her wearing a similar one as she stands beside her husband in a field, looking stoically at the camera in the fashion of her day.
Her life was more difficult than I can fathom. Her husband was a circuit-riding preacher, and, with their eight children, they moved from place to place, wherever he was needed, picking cotton on other people’s land, eating and sleeping and living in temporary houses borrowed from other people for the length of their stay.
She was a tiny woman, under five feet tall, weighing about 85 pounds, but she drug the huge sack, weighing more than she did by the time it was full of cotton, behind her as she worked her way up and down the rows in the sun. Singing.
My husband’s great grandmother, Nettie Stiewig, worked hard laboring in the fields, helped educate her children, cooked meals, did laundry, and somehow found time to create some of the most exquisite embroidered and crocheted linens I have ever seen.
But the story of her life, the one thing that I really know about her, is that she sang.
Up and down the rows, back bent, fingers raw to the point of bleeding, she worked in the heat and the dust with her husband and children toiling nearby.
But instead of complaining about the work, or wishing she could express her homemaker’s artistic heart in a house of her own, Grandma sang joyful, unending hymns to the Savior she loved.
In doing so, she left a legacy that lives still in the hearts of four generations after her.
We’ve been talking a lot in our Sunday School class about our personal stories, and how they are part of God’s big, eternal story. We all want to do that One Great Thing for Jesus, and wonder if, should the opportunity arise, we will recognize it, and be up for the challenge. Sometimes I think that One Great Thing may not be that obvious, even to ourselves, as we somehow trudge from day to day, task to task, waiting for “Something” to happen..
But when I see that apron, where I have lovingly hung it in my kitchen, I hear the message of her life, still powerful in the heart of a great-granddaughter-in-law who never even met her.
My work, through all the little moments and tasks of life, becomes worship when my heart is full of praise to Him.
The apron touches me, and fills me with the hope that the memory of my life which will echo through the generations after me will be the same as hers: “She worshipped Jesus while she worked. She sang.”
Martha
